Wall Street airline stocks fall out of the sky in pre-trade after widespread US systems failure

There’s an outage that’s grounded all the big and little planes across the US.

An outage worse than all the airport staff that’ve also been outage. That is, since The Great Quit, or whatever we’re calling that COVID-rather-not-work-anymore thing.

As I write, all the troubled US Airline stocks are themselves grounded… but not in the primary Oxford Dictionary sense:

It’s more this one (below), which has left US airline shares tumble in premarket trading:

The glitch according to reports out of the US is that a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computer’s on the blink and until that’s sorted the world’s busiest domestic and international system of airports is down and out.

There is, as one might expect, much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And a fair bit of selling.

Southwest Airlines (SWA) – down 2% before the opening bell .

American Airlines Group Inc. (AAL) down from +4% to 0.8%

United Airlines (UAL) – from +5.5% to be down -0.6%

And uh-oh – not a great week for these guys to be reporting apparently…

BREAKING: A cross-country Delta Airlines flight from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California to Atlanta was forced to abort take-off at the last second when flames shot out of the engine. There were 164 passengers on the plane but no one was hurt. pic.twitter.com/NGNuheJ8Q7

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) January 11, 2023

Delta Air Lines (DAL), was up +3.6% and has fallen back to 0.7%

“The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System,” the FAA tweeted early Wednesday. “We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now.”

“Operations across the National Airspace System are affected,” the FAA added. “We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.”

Cleared Update No. 2 for all stakeholders: ⁰⁰The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage. ⁰⁰While some functions are beginning to come back on line, National Airspace System operations remain limited.

— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023

In a subsequent tweet the FAA said it has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern time.

The Notice to Air Missions System provides pilots with safety information.

The 19th US Transportation Secretary and future presidential aspirant Pete Buttigieg said he’s spoken to the FAA and that he’s more or less on the case, again via Twitter.

I have been in touch with FAA this morning about an outage affecting a key system for providing safety information to pilots. FAA is working to resolve this issue swiftly and safely so that air traffic can resume normal operations, and will continue to provide updates.

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) January 11, 2023

A Notice to Air Missions contains “information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means,” according to the FAA’s website. The notice states the abnormal status of a component of the National Airspace System, not the normal status, according to the FAA.

Fortunately this guy is onto the 19th Transport Sec. I feel safer already.

Breaking – All flights nationwide have beengrounded – the #FAA is facing a computer outage.

Yet another major blow to incompetent Transportation Sect Mayor Pete and people who get important jobs with no experience to check some identity politics boxes.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 11, 2023

Flights that were in the skies at the time of grounding would be permitted to land, and there was believed to be no danger to any in-progress flights, NBC reported.

NBC added that airports in the EU reported that in-bound operations were on track. Or on runway, perhaps. More fitting.

We’ll keep you posted.